Google launched Internet Stat

Google launched a statistic centre called “Google Internet Stat”, which brings together industrial facts and insights provided by many third-party recourses across various industries around the world.
This new statistic centre can analyse data online and provide results with “Twitter-sized snippets and factoids”.
Internet Stat covers five major areas including macro economic trends, technologies, consumer trends, media consumption, and media landscape. There are also some sub-categories under each major area.
Earlier, I tried to search “Facebook” on Internet Stat, and the result is like this: 5% of all time online is spent on Facebook. Comscore is credited as the source, but if we click the link, we will be directed to a news article on Guardian UK.
I think such search tool like Internet Stat is very convenient for researchers and students— I get the short versions of facts quickly and I can also trace back to the sources. However, Google Internet Stat does allow users to submit contents. Now the sources Google credits on the Internet Stat’s homepage look reliable. But how Google can ensure the liability of the sources in future? Will it become something like Wikipedia— useful but not trust-worthy?
Moreover, I’m not sure whether the sources are offering the stats free of charge to Google. Well, it definitely can be a good opportunity to gain more traffic because people will want to trace back to the sources. But to what extent will they want to offer free stats? And how Google can generate profits through this?

Internet helps to maintain friendships

Recently I read an article from a Chinese magazine saying the Internet is like a fridge that can help us to maintain our friendships for a very long time. Sometimes, when we stop talking to our cyber friends for a while, our friendships become “frozen”. But once we start talking again, everything would feel “fresh” again.

Two days ago, I talked to one of my friends whom I have known for around seven years. We have met in real life, but just for several times. I think we stopped chatting on MSN around two years ago. Since then, we keep each other on MSN friend list—never delete, and never double click. Two nights ago, she suddenly sent me a message saying my avatar looks pretty. Then we start chatting again and everything feels exactly the same.

So it came to me how wonderful the Internet is in this respect. In real world, sometimes my friends are just people passing by. But in cyber space, many of my friends are always there. Looking at the 200 contacts on my MSN friend list, many of them last longer than my friendships in real life. The Internet helps us to keep our friendships “frozen” and “fresh”. We never know how each other has grown old over the years; and our friendships can be evergreen online.

Assign 1 evaluation of three websites

This post will look at three current affair websites and evaluate the effectiveness of their site structure, story construction and writing techniques. These three current affair websites are Newmatilda, Fair and Propublica.

Newmatilda.com
Newmatilda is an Australian based independent journalism website specialised in “intelligent coverage of Australian politics, business, consumerism, civil society, international affairs, media and culture” (Newmatilda 2009). It provides insights and discussions that are not usually covered by Australian mainstream media.

Newmatilda has a very clean-cut homepage, with different sections neatly placed into well-organised grids. Right under the site’s logo on the top, the navigation tool contains simple links to “Recent Articles”, “Archive”, “About US”, “FAQ”, “Contribute” and “Contact”. These links are repeated at the bottom of the homepage again through text-links so that users with low Internet speed can download the links faster.

Moreover, search engine is conveniently located on the top as well as at the bottom. There are also links to different categories of topics down there so that users can browse the areas they are interested in without looking through the whole archive. It is also great that users do not need to scroll down much to see the whole homepage.

A distinctive advantage of Newmatilda is that the whole website can be further customised to users’ needs through simple steps of register or sign-in. This not only allows more interactions between users and websites, but also entrusts users more power to manipulate the website’s settings according to their own preferences.

The most recent feature articles are promoted on the homepage with pictures, headlines, kickers and standfirsts. The most important story has the headline with the biggest font size to grab users’ attention immediately. Most pictures are highly-contrasted in colours so that they can stand out from the white background of the grids.

The headlines are short and to-the-point, and contain the most important key words of the stories. Take their latest news piece as example, the headline is “There's Big Trouble Down At The Mill” with “CHINA” on top and a phrase “The arrest of Australian” below. These simple words give readers a very clear idea about what they can expect once they click the link and start to read the story (Bowles & Borden 2000).

On the story page of “There's Big Trouble Down At The Mill”, the bold-font standfirst is written in green-blue colour, which is different with the colour of the rest of the text. The standfirst effectively summarises the gist of the article. The story consists of 14 short paragraphs, and each paragraph is made up of two to four sentences (Smith 2003). Such story is not particularly long so readers will not feel overwhelmed by dense words when reading the story.

The keywords of this article such as “stern hu” and “Chinese steel industry” are highlighted as “Tags” under the picture on each story page. Users can access other related articles by clicking the tags they are interested in.

The in-text links of this particular story are all from outside sources including Xinhua News Agency, which is a very credible national news service of China. Authors of Newmatilda in general are not afraid to link to outside sources in their articles. The choices of outside sources are mainly plausible because most sites they link to are credible news services like ABC and New York Times. However, most articles on Newmatilda do not really use many in-text links.

Related stories are listed at the bottom of each story page. However, they are all linked to Newmatilda’s own articles only. It is recommendable that Newmatilda should have more external links to present users with different view points from other websites.

It is very convenient that users can click “Discuss this article” at the end of each story page to leave feedbacks. Such function encourages users’ comments and interactions.


Propublica.org
Propublica is a US based, non-profit news site specialised in investigative journalism. Many of its stories are co-published with mainstream media in the US.

Propublica in general looks more like a feature section from traditional newspaper. The homepage with bright backgrounds and dark-colour words gives people an impression of seriousness.

There is a “Sections” button right under their logo on top of their homepage. The “Sections” button is actually pull-down menu that links to seven major categories and six sub-categories of their archives. Such sort of menu not only helps to navigate readers, but also helps to save more limited page space (because websites cannot let user scroll too much).

There are also keywords like “Katrina Hospital”, “Bailout Guide”, and “Stimulus” on the top beside the Section button. So users looking for reports on popular topics can dive straight into the related articles conveniently. There is also a search engine located at the very top of the homepage.

Above their site banner, the page linking to “Steal Our Stories” tells users it is free to republish Propublica’s articles and pictures for free as long as people link back to Propublica. This greatly encourages people to share Propublica’s articles and also boosts up Propublica’s ranking on search engines.

Like Newmatilda, recent features are promoted on homepage with pictures, headlines, and leads. Headlines use dark-blue colour and bigger font size to stand out.

Most headlines of Propublica are very short and powerful. For example, in the “Ongoing investigation” section, the headlines are "War-Zone Workers Face Struggle for Health Benefits", "Energy Industry Uses Misleading Data", "Problem Nurses Stay on the Job as Patients Suffer". All these headline are written in Subject-Verb-Object” pattern to “keep structure simple so ideas are easy to digest” for the readers(Smith 2003).

In addition, Propublica use captions, headlines, leads very effectively to tell readers what to expect behind a link. For example, on Propublica’s homepage, the caption of the Memorial photo tells us what happened in the medical centre. Then the big-sized, colour-highlighted title "After Katrina: The Deadly Choices At Memorial" tells us the story is related to Hurricane Katrina. Even if some readers do not know about Katrina, there is a short explanation about the event under the headline. Readers can access the full story by clicking the picture, the headline and the link “Read the story” below the explanation.

Beside this feature article, there are also three other pictures with captions linking to other related stories that explore the Katrina incident from other angles. Readers can trace back to the major story page from any related story page by clicking the “See related story” link. There are also links with pictures and captions at the bottom of each story page that bring readers to other related pages.

The feature story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” is five-page long, and there is no in-text links, highlighted keywords or bullet-pointed lists. Such sort of long plain text is quite the opposite of “making online articles short and skimmable” as proposed by Bowles and Borden (2000). However, given the complicated nature of investigative journalism, it is reasonable to assume readers will be willing to read the full story if it is well written.

Each paragraph of this feature contains one single idea and remains relatively short—around four sentences—so that readers will not be burdened to read long and dense paragraphs (Smith 2003). There are also subheadings and pictures within the text to break each page into smaller segments (Dube 2003).

On the right-side column of each page, there are multimedia files (pictures, illustrations, videos) to further explain the feature story. The “Interactive Timeline: Katrina and Its Aftermath” page allows readers to click on a flash graph to choose dates and read short briefs about what happened in time sequence. Each short brief was also accompanied by kickers, pictures, and captions. People can leave feedback by clicking “Comment” button at the end of each story.

There are links to related stories under the “Other Hurricane Katrina Coverage” heading. These related stories are all from Propublica itself. However, Propublica does link to other outside sources through in-text links in other articles. But most of those outside sources are American mainstream media.

Most of Propublica’s external links are in the “Breaking news on the web” section that directs readers to some latest stories online. Most links in this section guide readers to stories from American major mainstream publications such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Considering Propublica is now led by former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and former investigative editor of the New York Times, it is obvious that Propublica has deeper relationships and more cooperation with mainstream media compared with Newmatilda and Fair.


Fair.org
Fair is a US based progressive current affair website promoting structural reform in the journalism industry to deconstruct the monopoly of the transnational media conglomerates.

Fair’s homepage contains most of the necessities for a website, however, it dose not give users a particular impression. The entire website is text-dominated and does not contain many multimedia files as Newmatilda and Propublica do.

Fair has a powerful categorising system by which users can choose to browse articles by issue area, region or media outlet. However, users have to click “Issues & Archives” for the list of categories. Hiding the list of categories in some sub-sections does not give users a clear straight forward idea about where to find the information they want. Some people may just choose to give up and Google some other websites from where they can find information quicker. So it would be recommendable for Fair to place a pull-down menu like Propublica’s on their homepage.

Fair’s homepage lists the headlines and the first two paragraphs of their recent blog posts with keywords and in-text links highlighted in blue colour. Most of their blog posts are as short as three or four paragraphs. No matter which headline we choose on the homepage, we will be directed to a page showing all recent posts in full length. This page is particularly long and requires lots of scrolling. Only after we click a headline again on this page, we can see the individual page for a particular story. So it will be more convenient for readers if Fair links individual story page directly with the headlines appearing on their homepage.

The headlines on Fair’s homepage are not very well composed because many of them are not straight forward enough. For example, if we look at these headlines—“The Fabulously Unsurprising Lies of Glenn Beck”, “Corporate Media 'Default Position': 'War Must Go On'”, “Way Cleared for More 'Excessive Media Consolidation'”, and “WSJ 'Scumbag' Columnist Gets Predictably Slimy”, we would have little idea what the articles are about without reading the whole contents. The using of quotes, adjectives and metaphors makes the headlines sound a bit abstract.

Fair uses extensive in-text links to outside sources. These sources include a wide variety of websites. Keywords are listed as tags at the end of each story so that readers can further explore related articles.

Finally, Fair will definitely benefit from having more multimedia elements to make their web pages look more attractive. Recent posts should not be promoted with headlines and part of the articles but with headlines and leads (or kickers). Their headlines should use a more down-to-the-earth approach, which tells readers directly what to expect from the articles.